The Sun's Financial Diary

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance has an on-going special series on successful investing. Today, the first segment of the “The Five Keys to Investing Success” is out and key number one is Make Investing a Habit, a principle that I couldn’t agree more. The article begins with a suggestion to people with small amount to invest every [...]

When buying real estate, everybody knows “location, location, location.” However, the difference between locations shouldn’t just be neighborhoods in the city, the city itself should also be on your mind. You certainly don’t want to live in one of those “most dangerous” cities, even though you may find a perfect location in the city. Morgan [...]

Early last month, we saw an open house sign nearby. We were not really shopping for a new house back then (even now), but since it was in the area we like, we decided to take a tour. The house, built in 1998, has 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, 2 car garage, and a unfinished basement. [...]

A surprise was in the mail last night: a gift from EmigrantDirect. Nothing big or fancy, but I take it as a gesture from EmigrantDirect of being their customer for the past year. So what’s the gift? It is a small writing pad with my name printed on every page, the kind of gift that [...]

I ususally don’t read very carefully the newsletter Fidelity sends to me as I see it as an advertisement. But an article in today’s E-News got my attention. It’s about how to take advantage of the new tax law passed in August to boost savings. Below is the summary of the article Workplace Roth 401(k) [...]

I read an article yesterday on the New York Times website about the potential privacy risk of no-swipe credit cards, those cards that don’t require manually swiping through a machine, therefore, no signature needed. For a customer with a no-swipe card (for example, the Blink card from Chase), all he/she needs to do is waving [...]

Just got off the phone with Vanguard and Scottrade regarding transferring part of my Roth IRA asset from Scottrade to Vanguard and the news wasn’t pretty. I submitted the paper work on September 29th and had expected to whole process to finish in October. According to Vanguard, the transfer can take up to four weeks, [...]

Yesterday, an article appeared on Kiplinger offered a list of year-end financial tricks aimed to help us to be more organized and disciplined for our personal finance. Among the suggestions, the one that I like the most is “Put your savings on autopilot,” and we have been doing that for quite a while. Here’s our [...]